It was summer of 1992, and I had just graduated from high school in a small town, Millis, Massachusetts, where I had been living with my mother and stepfather for the previous seven years.

I was flying out to California to go to college. When I got to California, I called my mother to let her know that I was there safe. And she commented that when I went down the airport terminal I never looked back once. And I didn’t.

When Amy Seitz got pregnant with her second child last year, she knew that being 35 years old meant there was an increased chance of chromosomal disorders like Down syndrome. She wanted to be screened, and she knew just what kind of screening she wanted — a test that's so new, some women and doctors don't quite realize what they've signed up for.

Ross Reynolds talks with anti-smoking advocate Vince Willmore about the public health benefits of raising the tobacco purchase age from 18 to 21. Willmore is vice president of communications for the Campaign For Tobacco Free Kids.

When the British newspaper The Mirrorreported in late December that a UK mother named Denise Sumpter was still breast-feeding her daughter Belle, who is 6 and a half years old, two experts were invited to weigh in on the practice.

As a senior at Lake Stevens High School, Ivy Jacobsen appeared confident. Blonde, popular, and a varsity athlete, her peers labeled her as the perfect girl next door. But Jacobsen said there was a time when she wasn't so confident.

"I was very insecure. I had many friends but I was still really shy," Jacobsen said. "I wasn't really comfortable with who I was, body-wise."

When the children's television show Sesame Street first hit the air in 1969, many were deeply skeptical that you could use TV to introduce very young children to the basics of reading and math. But the experiment proved to be a remarkable success; Sesame Street has reached several generations of toddlers with its combination of educational content and pure entertainment. And now, Sesame Workshop is using new technology to reach the next generation.

When my friend tells me she’s thinking about having a baby on her own, my mind flashes immediately to that January morning in 2011 when, as I just settled my eighth graders into a rare calm, my son’s father burst into my classroom with a video camera, sloppy drunk, slurring demands about my son’s whereabouts.

I'm the father of a 5-year-old girl whose skin color is several shades lighter than my own.

Her eyes aren't black like mine; they're an icy blue. She has blond streaks in her hair. And most people say she doesn't look like me — though my mother thinks she does. Like most Indians who value light skin, my mother worries my daughter might turn dark if she plays in the sun too long.